The Rise of New Economic Cultures

Excerpted from a fascinating interview of Manuel Castells by Paul Mason, for BBC 4:

Manuel Castells:

“When I mention this alternative economic culture, it’s a combination of two things.

“A number of people have been doing this for quite a while already because they don’t agree with the meaninglessness of their lives. Now there is something else – it’s the legion of consumers who cannot consume.

“And, therefore, since they do not consume – they don’t have the money, they don’t have the credit, they don’t have anything – then they try at least to make sense of their lives doing something different.

“So, it’s because of needs and because of values – the two things together – that’s why it’s expanding.”

* Paul Mason: You write that economies are cultural – can you expand on that?

“If we want to work to make money, to consume, it’s because we believe that by buying a new car or by buying a new television or a bigger flat, we are going to be happier. This is a particular form of culture.

“On the contrary… people are reversing the notion: what is important in their life cannot be bought, in most cases. But they don’t have the choice anymore because they are already trapped in a machine.

“What happens when the machine is not working anymore? People say, ‘well I am really stupid. I am running all the time for nonsense’.”

* Paul Mason: How big is this culture change?

“It is fundamental because it triggers a crisis of trust in the two big powers of our world: the political system and the financial system.

People don’t trust where they put their money and they don’t trust those who they delegate in terms of their vote.

“It’s a dramatic crisis of trust and if there is no trust, there is no society.

“What we are not going to see is the economic collapse per se because societies cannot work in a social vacuum. If the economic institutions don’t work, if the financial institutions don’t work, the power relations that exist in society change the financial system in ways favoured to the financial system and it doesn’t collapse. People collapse, not the financial system.

“The notion is the banks are going to be alright, we are not going to be alright. So there is a cultural change. A big one. Total distrust in the institutions of finance and politics.

“Some people start already living differently as they can – some because they want alternative ways of life, others because they don’t have any other choice.

“What I refer to is about the observation of one of my latest studies on people who have decided not to wait for the revolution – to start living differently – meaning the expansion of what I call in a technical term ‘non-capitalist practices’.

“They are economic practices but they don’t have a for-profit motivation – such as barter networks; such as social currencies; co-operatives; self-management; agricultural networks; helping each other simply in terms of wanting to be together; networks of providing services for free to others in the expectation that someone will also provide to you. All this exists and it’s expanding throughout the world.”

* Paul Mason: 97% of people you surveyed [in Catalonia] have engaged in non-capitalist economic activity.

“Well, it’s about 30-40,000 who are engaged quite fully in alternative forms of life. And I differentiate between people who consciously organise their lives around alternative values, with people who live normal lives but at the same time they look in many, many aspects to live differently.

“For instance, during the crisis, one third of Barcelona families lent money, without interest, to people who are not in their family.”

…

* Paul Mason: You have these diverse groups, they protest against subject A today, and subject B tomorrow, and they play World of Warcraft at night – but they’re not going to achieve what Castro and Guevara achieved, are they?

“The impact on the political institutions is almost negligible because the political institutions are impervious to change. But if you look at what’s happening in terms of the consciousness… you have things like the huge debate of social inequality that didn’t exist three years ago.

“In terms of demonstrating, the system is much stronger than the embryos of the movement… you reach the minds of the people through a process of communication, and this process of communication is today fundamentally through the internet and debating.

“It’s a long process from the minds of the people to the institutions of society. Let’s take an historical example: toward the end of the 19th Century in Europe, there were basically the Conservatives and the Liberals, right and left.

“But then something happened – industrialisation, working class movements, new ideologies and new movements started. All this was not in the political system. It took 20 to 30 years, then you have the socialists and then the split from the socialists… and the liberals disappear basically.

“It will change politics, but not through organised forms of politics in the same way. Why? Because networks are different and networks don’t need hierarchical organisations.”

In conclusion:

“All this together is not going to be a great electoral coalition, is not going to be any new party, any new anything. It’s simply society against the state and against the financial institutions – not against capitalism, by the way – against financial institutions, which is different.

“With this climate what happens is that more and more our societies will become ungovernable and, therefore, we can have all kinds of phenomenon – some of them very dangerous.

“Of course we’ll see many expressions of alternative forms of politics which will escape the mainstream traditional political institutions, and some of them, of course, going back and trying to have a nationalistic, primitive community to attack everybody and to ultimately build a commune cut off from the world and oppress their own people.

“But what happens in any process of disorganised, chaotic social change, there are all these phenomena co-existing and the way they play out, one against the other, will depend ultimately if the political institutions open up enough channels of participation for the energy that exists in society for change that could overcome the resistance of the dark forces that exist in all societies.”

WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.